What I read on Slack on a Wednesday afternoon

That single Slack post sat on the channel without replies for almost two hours. I am sure other people on the team saw it inside the first ten minutes and did exactly what I did, which was scroll past it, sit with it, type something, delete it, and close the tab without sending anything. By the time I checked again at half past five, the one heart reaction from the colleague in Coventry had been joined by four more reacts and one short reply that just said 'so sorry x.' Nothing else. No card. No collection. No public mention from anyone above Marnie's grade.

The next morning at standup Marnie's camera was off. Someone asked if she was okay and she said, in the same flat tone she uses when explaining a budget variance, that her dog had been put to sleep on Tuesday evening and she would be quieter than usual on calls for a week. The product manager said he was sorry and moved on to sprint priorities inside thirty seconds. That is, in my experience, what pet-loss in a workplace actually looks like. The grief is real, the coworker is signalling it, and the workplace itself does not have a register for it. The card, if you are sending one, has to do work the room is not doing.

Two ways this register goes wrong, and they are not the same as human-family loss

The workplace version of human-family loss usually fails in one direction, which is over-claiming a relationship with the deceased. Pet-loss in a workplace fails in the opposite direction more often: it treats the loss with the gravity the workplace reserves for human family, and the coworker has almost certainly not asked for that. A whole-team bouquet. A card signed by twelve people who have never seen the animal. An 'I cannot imagine what you are going through' line from a regional VP who has been on three calls with the coworker in eighteen months. Each of these reads as performance, even when meant kindly. The coworker is grieving a particular animal. The card needs to know which one.

The other failure is the one the rest of our office made on Marnie's Wednesday, which was to wave the loss past as if it had not happened, because the workplace has no formal slot for it. Two hours of no replies on the Slack post was not respect. It was forty colleagues being uncomfortable and using the absence of an HR template as cover. Both failures are common. The right move sits narrower than either: acknowledge the real grief, name something specific you remember about the animal, refuse the bouquet move unless the coworker has explicitly invited it, and do not put bereavement-leave language inside the card.

If you sit with them in standup every day

You have seen the animal across months of Zoom calls and the coworker knows that. A short note that names the pet by name and one concrete detail you remember actually helps here. Three sentences is the upper limit. Philosophising about grief is too much. Pretending you knew the pet better than you did is worse than nothing.

  • So sorry about Hatch.
  • I will miss him in the corner of your screen.
  • I am sorry. Take the week.
  • I saw your message. I am sorry. Hatch was a real presence on our team, even if half the team would not have admitted it. Thinking of you.
  • Sorry about your dog. No reply needed. I have moved the Thursday review to next week and pushed the Friday client call to Mike, so nothing on our shared work needs anything from you between now and the seventeenth.
  • I noticed Hatch had not been in the background of your calls for a couple of weeks and I had wondered. I am so sorry. Sending you a quiet hello from this end.
  • I am sorry. I cannot pretend to know what losing a fourteen-year dog is like, because I have not done it yet. I am thinking of you, though, and I am here when you are ready to be back at the desk, however that looks.

For a coworker on another team you mostly Slack

A full sympathy card is probably the wrong vehicle here and a short DM is the right one. Cards take a few minutes to read, sit on a desk for a week, and quietly demand some kind of acknowledgement from the recipient, however small. A two-line DM acknowledges the loss without asking the coworker to do any work in return. Send the DM. Skip the card.

  • Saw your post. Sorry, mate.
  • I do not want to take up space on your DM. Just wanted to say I am sorry about Pip. Take care of yourself this week.
  • I am sorry. We have not worked together much, but I have seen Pip turn up in your retros twice and I am sad to hear she is gone.
  • Just read your update. Sorry.
  • I am sorry about your dog. I know we do not really know each other, and I am not pretending otherwise. I just did not want to scroll past it without saying anything, especially when the channel had been quiet on it for two hours and I was sure you had seen the count.

When you are their manager and the direct report is the one grieving

Managers tend to fail this moment by importing the language of bereavement leave for a human family member into a register that is not that. The coworker does not want to be told the PTO code or asked to fill in a form. They want their manager to acknowledge the loss as a real thing, give them a small specific permission to be less productive for a few days, and not put them on a performance call that week. That is the whole job.

  • Take the week.
  • I saw your message. I am so sorry about Hatch. Take the rest of the week. The Thursday review can move and your one-on-one can wait until you are ready.
  • I read what you posted. I am sorry. Hatch was a real animal and this is a real loss, and I do not want you on the Friday client call. I have rerouted it.
  • I have cleared your calendar through Monday. Take longer if you need it.
  • I am sorry. I am not going to pretend I knew Hatch the way you did. I will say I have watched you talk about him in your one-on-ones for two years and I know what he meant. Look after yourself.

When your own manager is the one whose pet has died

The power gradient runs the wrong way here. The manager is usually the one granting room for grief in the team, and when the grief is theirs, the team often freezes because the usual permission-granter has nothing to say. A short DM from a direct report, in my experience, is one of the kindest things a manager actually gets in this moment, partly because so few of their reports send anything at all.

  • Saw the post. So sorry about Bramble.
  • I have got the Thursday standup if you would like to skip it.
  • I read your message. I am so sorry. There is nothing on my side that cannot wait, so please do not feel any need to check in on the project this week, and I will pick up anything inbound from the Truro client.
  • I am sorry about your cat. I know the team has been quieter than usual about it on the wider channel and I did not want you to think I had not noticed.

For a remote teammate several time zones away

Remote pet-loss is its own register. The teammate is grieving in their own house, in their own time zone, often with no one on the team in the same city to drop round with a casserole or a card. The card from a remote teammate, if you send one, is more isolated and slightly stranger than an in-office card. A short voice note or a one-line DM tends to land better than anything posted. If you do send a card, send it electronically rather than by mail; the timing matters more than the paper.

  • Sending this from the Adelaide office. Sorry about your dog.
  • I am sorry about Olive.
  • The time difference means I am writing this at six in the morning my time, so do not feel any obligation to respond on your end. Take care.
  • I saw the photo of Olive you posted last month in the wider thread. She had a very particular face. I am sorry she is gone.
  • I am sorry. I know our team has never actually been in the same room and I have only ever seen Olive on a screen, but she was a real presence on this team for the months I have been here, and I just wanted to say so from the Brisbane end of the call grid.

If the team is going to do a group card, here is how to make it land

The default group sympathy card for a coworker's pet often fails because the organiser invites the entire department to sign, and the result is twelve generic 'so sorry for your loss' lines from people who never saw the animal. The coworker reads it once, finds nothing in it that names the actual pet they are grieving, and puts it on the kitchen counter for a week before recycling. Keep the circle small. Brief the signers. Seed the first line yourself with something concrete, so the rest have a tone to match instead of reaching for the laminated sympathy sentence.

Lines that work as seed lines, if you are organising the card.

  • Marnie, sorry about Hatch.
  • I will miss the tartan bed in the corner of your calls.
  • I never met Hatch in person, but he was the dog I saw the most on this team in two years. I am sorry he is gone.
  • Hatch always lifted his head when the courier knocked. I am going to miss that. Sorry, Marnie.
  • I am sorry about Hatch. He had the slow blink of a dog who knew exactly how much he had earned, and I am sorry our team is not going to see that face come up over your shoulder in the standup on Monday morning, or any other morning.
  • I have only been on this team six months, and I had already learned the names of two of your dogs from your Slack background. I am sorry about Hatch.

The funny register, only when the coworker has set it themselves

Some pets become office characters by their owner's own framing. The dog the coworker has been bringing in on Fridays for three years and who has a Slack emoji of his own face. The cat with the Twitter following the coworker has been quoting in standups. The rabbit who got name-checked in every retro for two years as the team mascot. For those animals, a card that suddenly drops into solemn sympathy-card register reads as off, because the coworker has been treating the animal as part of the comedy of the office and the card needs to match that.

  • The emoji stays.
  • Friday office is going to be measurably worse without Biscuit.
  • Biscuit was the only one in our standups who knew what was actually going on. The team feels smaller this week. Sorry, mate.
  • I am sorry about Biscuit. I am also sorry on behalf of every UPS driver in north London who is now going to have to do their rounds undisturbed.
  • I am going to miss Biscuit, and I am also going to miss the moment in every retro where you remembered something he had done that morning and we lost ten minutes to it. The retros are about to be shorter and worse.

The honest admission against this whole article

Most of what you have just read is for the minority of cases where a card is actually warranted. The bigger truth, which the rest of this piece has only glanced at, is that for most coworker-pet-loss situations the right response is a six-word Slack DM and absolutely no card at all. The card is for the cases where you sat next to the animal in standup for two years, or where the coworker has explicitly grieved the pet in a workplace-visible way, or where you are their manager and a card is part of the small package of acknowledgement you are choosing to give them. For the rest, which is most of it, a card from you would do less good than your silence and your one quiet emoji react.

If you are not sure which case you are in, the test is small and worth asking yourself honestly. Could you name the pet's name and one concrete detail about it without checking the coworker's Slack history? If the answer is no, the card is not your card to send. Send one of these instead, in a DM, and stop there.

  • I saw your post. I am so sorry. No need to reply.
  • Just read about Hatch. Sorry, Marnie. Thinking of you.
  • I am sorry. Take care.
  • Sorry about your dog. No reply needed.
  • I saw it. I am sorry. Quietly here if you need anything practical.

That is the whole shape of it. The card was always the wrong genre for most readers of this article. The genre most pet-loss-at-work moments actually want is the short note in a DM that says 'I saw it, I am sorry, you do not have to respond,' and that genre is two sentences long.

This piece sits at the intersection of pet-loss sympathy and workplace sympathy, both of which the corpus covers in their own right. For the wider message-bank treatment of pet-loss across any sender register, the resource is condolence messages for the loss of a pet, which is the one to use when the bereaved is a friend or a family member rather than a coworker. For the workplace sympathy register when the loss is a human family member, the bank at sympathy messages for a coworker is the closest neighbour. For the awkwardness of writing a sympathy line to someone you barely overlap with at work, the companion is sympathy card message for someone you only know through work. And for the moment the bereaved is a coworker whose human parent has died, what to say when a coworker loses a parent covers a different gravity altogether. The four-slot pillar on sympathy-card structure that ties the cluster together is what to write in a sympathy card.

Turn it into a group card, if the team really wants one

If two or three people who actually knew the pet have decided a group card is the right move, the practical question is how to organise it without it sliding into the twelve-signature performance that pet-loss group cards usually become. A group ecard is, in this register, often better than a paper one, because it lets the small circle of people who genuinely remembered the animal sign without obliging the wider org to participate.

A group sympathy ecard also fixes the geometry problem when the team is split across time zones, which most teams are. You can create a card online in a few minutes, send the link to the four or five colleagues who actually saw the animal across the months, schedule the delivery for a quiet weekday morning (not Monday, never Monday at 8:14), and let each contributor write the line only they can write. Brief them in one sentence when you send the link: 'Name the dog, name one specific thing, keep it short.' That single instruction will save five of the six signers from reaching for the wrong shelf.

If you would rather skip the card entirely and you are unsure what to write in the DM you are sending instead, the calm reference page is what to write in a sympathy card. The four-slot formula on that page works for a one-line DM the same way it works for a paper card, just with three of the four slots silently absent.

A small drift to finish

The Wednesday Marnie posted about Hatch was the same afternoon I had been planning, very tentatively, to walk to the second-hand bookshop on New Street in Worcester to look for a paperback copy of a 1989 cookery book I have been trying to replace for a year. The original was a hardback called The Polish Country Kitchen Cookbook that my grandmother had given me, and which had gone into a Pickfords box during a house move in 2014 and never come out the other side. I did not walk to the bookshop that afternoon. I shut the laptop, walked twice round the city centre instead, sat for a long time on the steps of the cathedral on a bench that has somebody else's initials carved into the back of it, and then went home and wrote Marnie a short DM that mentioned Hatch by name and the tartan bed and nothing else. The cookery book is still not replaced. The bench is still on College Green. The DM, which I have not gone back to read since, said three sentences and stopped, which is the most useful thing I have ever written for a coworker in a sympathy register and the article above has been trying to say so for two thousand words.